Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 - December 7th, 1940
It is usually in reviews of Toscanini conducting the work of composers like Sibelius that absurd nationalist-grouping nonsense creeps in: "Although brilliantly played, the performance was far more Mediterranean than Nordic in character", or "The Finnish severity was tempered by Italian lyricism" or "The work's sonority took a noticeable trip south for warmer climates." Comments such as these get extremely tiresome to read and add nothing to our understanding of what the music means. After all, did Sibelius really mean to compose specifically Finnish-sounding music?
Well, yes actually. As much as I despise reviewer statements like the ones I lampooned above, in the case of the Sibelius Second Symphony I hear a bit of truth to them. Toscanini performs this entire symphony with an aggressive strength and intense lyricism that is more appropriate to verismo opera than Sibelius. This is not always a bad thing - certain passages in the first movement have a beautiful clarity that is rarely duplicated in other performances, and the entire third movement is gripping in its tensile whirling figures and broadly sustained lines. However in most cases the performance suffers from Toscanini's overwrought interpretation. Most glaring in this regard is the second movement, which almost sounds like it has to be a joke. Toscanini evidently believes the andante pulse relates to the dotted quarter note rather than the eighth note, resulting in a tempo more than twice as fast as normal. Even the dynamics are compressed both in duration and amplitude: the broad hairpins in the brass are so streamlined that hardly any dynamic change is even noticeable. (Speaking of which, this performance has the worst brass playing I have yet heard from the NBC Symphony. The tutti climaxes sound like students blaring away at their most obnoxious, which is especially puzzling in light of the sensitive playing they demonstrated in other works from the very same concert.)
This recording is not a complete failure, but nor is it a success. Toscanini does illuminate certain aspects of the score in an admirable way, but his overall understanding of the work is highly suspect. Although there are moments of great beauty to be found in this performance, these moments are overshadowed by long stretches of high-strung and unsympathetic lack of refinement.
Sibelius: Pojhola's Daughter - December 7th, 1940
This performance of Pojhola's Daughter comes from the very same concert as the Symphony No. 2, and is much, much more successful as an interpretation. This most impressionistic of Sibelius scores is performed with a breathtaking delicacy that nonetheless does not shy away from the almost Straussian interpolations from the brass. The ending in particular is sustained with a breathtaking strand of line from the strings that seems to literally melt into the beyond. This is Toscanini at his most thought-provokingly sensitive, and it is a bit of a mystery to me how this recording can possibly have been drawn from the same concert as the inappropriately intense Symphony No. 2. To paraphrase Albus Dumbledore, I can only assume that with a figure such as Toscanini, who was rather greater than most musicians, his mistakes tended to be correspondingly huger.
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That's all for Day 12! Check back tomorrow for Franck's Symphony in D Minor and works by Glinka and (wait for it...) Stravinsky. See you then!
There is a very interesting political background to this. The fact that Toscanini not only conducted his famous Shostakovich Seventh but also one or two other Soviet composers, now forgotten, had made me wonder about his attitude to the OTHER monsrous tyranny of his time. Well, the date of this concert speaks by itself. Between 1939 and 1940, Finland had been the protagonist of the most awesome David Vs. Goliath struggle in modern history, when a few Finnish divisions on skis had hurled back, time and time again, dozens of Soviet armoured divisions. The Soviet aggression against Finland was universally seen as a part of the Axis worldwide aggression, and the universal admiration gained by Finland was as much against Germany as against Russia. The Italian secret services reported to Mussolini that "when our people shout 'Down with Russia' in the streets, what they really mean is 'Down with Germany'." (Alas, he did not take the hint.) Indeed, France and Britain were in the advanced stages of preparing to send a task force to help the Finns, in spite of enormous logistical difficulties and of the fact that this would broadent their war to the Soviet Union, when Finland finally surrendered; and even so, the bleeding inflicted on the Red Army was such that Stalin (who was basically a coward) only demanded a comparatively small border adjustment. This was the impression Finland had left on the world when Toscanini conducted this. A few months later, the Finns blotted their copybook when they entered the war on Germany's side, and suddenly the USSR was an Ally. At which point, Toscanini was heard performing Soviet composers. After the war, the Finns distinguished themselves again by being the only East European country to resist Communist tyranny. In 1948, the Communist Ministers of the Interior in Czechoslovakia and in Finland both tried to overthrow the coalition governments to which they belonged; the Czech one managed it, the Finn was arrested - and the Soviets did nothing (they probably still remembered those Finnish soldiers on their skis). And in 1952 we hear Toscanini deliver his heroic account of Finlandia - and we also find that he has not only come to dislike the Leningrad Symphony, but that he actually could not remember performing it. The picture is clear. I imagine that Toscanini would have said the same as his great contemporary Churchill: "I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." But neither Churchill nor Toscanini forgot that, in the long run, the Devil is the Devil.
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